Food Blogger Takes on the Biggest Name in Wine: Robert Parker

In her quirky and endearing new memoir, "The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization" (Harcourt, $23), wine writer Alice Feiring sharpens up the debate over the palate and power of Robert Parker, the world's reigning wine critic. Nobody has done more than Mr. Parker, through his writings and ratings, to raise American wine consciousness. But Ms. Feiring, who writes a Web log at alicefeiring.com, argues (as did the 2005 documentary "Mondovino") that Mr. Parker's impact on the core values of honest wine has been negative — catastrophically so. Happily, she keeps the diatribe light with her self-deprecating humor and a running commentary on her often-bumpy love life.

The nub of Ms. Feiring's case against Mr. Parker is that his highest scores, as posted in his influential journal, the Wine Advocate, go to unnaturally rich, alcoholic, and forceful wines. Her disdainful word for such wines is "spoofulated." These showy critters are a pole apart from traditional wines, which are made with as little manipulation or buffing up as possible. Typically leaner and lower in alcohol than their Parkerized counterparts, these "natural" wines, as they are often called, can get shoved into the shadows by the heavyweights in blind tastings — even though they may be better partners at the dinner table.

If Mr. Parker's taste in wine were simply his own, Ms. Feiring wouldn't be on the warpath. But so great is his power, she argues, that winemakers in droves are impelled to abandon traditional winemaking in favor of pumping up their product in order to win the favor of his palate. They know that a high score is sure to translate into higher prices for their wines. Those who resist winemaking by the numbers risk becoming wallflowers in the dance of commerce.

Mr. Parker isn't the only so-called Goliath that Ms. Feiring fearlessly takes on in her book. Visiting the Champagne region's holiest vineyard, Krug's Clos du Mesnil — the wines of which can cost thousands of dollars a bottle — Ms. Feiring cheekily asks the winemaker, "Do you have even one earthworm in that soil?" And of herself, she properly asks: "Oh, the quandary: When to speak up and when to hold my tongue?" Luckily for the reader, her tart tongue usually wins.

Ceaselessly traveling to wine regions in Europe, Ms. Feiring logs ample quality time with her favored breed of natural wines and their makers. There's a memorable portrait of Nicolas Joly, a leader of the holistic movement called biodynamics, whose body language operated "with a total integration of the vertical, horizontal, and sagittal planes" — descriptors which are a tip-off to the writer's training as a dance therapist.

Reading about nothing but wine can get to be a slog, even in the hands of a lively writer. As her title suggests, Ms. Feiring has wisely perked up her text by letting us in on her romances, both real and fantasized. In the Rhône Valley, she meets a handsome winemaker who resists her charms: "All right, I thought, Picasso was a jerk, too. I love Philip Roth, but evidently, he didn't do too well with women. I resigned myself. No magical experience here." There's a bittersweet portrait of "Owl Man" (so named because he'd hoot at owls in the night). Like the author herself, Owl Man "had the olfactory acuity of a bat." Ms. Feiring, who grew up in an observant Jewish home, credits her Yiddish-speaking grandfather, a home winemaker who made her smell everything edible or drinkable, as her sensory mentor.

At a NoHo coffee shop one morning last week, Ms. Feiring nibbled on a rugelach and explained that "The Battle for Wine and Love" almost didn't get written. Two years ago, she'd tried but failed to sell "a wine guide with a really boring title, like 'Honest Wine,'" she said. "My last agent said, 'This isn't the book you want to write.' My friends were telling me, 'Do a memoir.' But my life didn't seem that interesting." And so she merged wine guide with memoir. While writing it, she says, "I was extremely happy" — not a typical emotion for a writer at work. Ms. Feiring writes, "For years, my mother was embarrassed that I was a wine writer: 'This is what you do? This is what I sent you to Yeshiva for?'"

If this terrific book fails to win Mom over, the failing won't be her daughter's.